赤潮 akashio/marée rouge/red tide (scène 25)

2019

Performing Arts Research Centre, Helsinki

Returning from a sixth travel through Japan, Vincent Roumagnac presents a series of new works realized during the residency, in resonance with his doctoral artistic research project Reacclimating the Stage at the Performing Arts Research Center, TeaK/Uniarts Helsinki. The open-studio like installation consists of an enigmatic assemblage of a video work (Shiori-no-ike), two studies for theater backdrops (Seto Naikai), a fragment of deferred scenography (Ochitsubaki/Deferred Landscape N°8) and five asmr-like tests of a whispered excerpt from the Act V of Racine’s Phaedra (1677).

“We know that we live in a time when human activity has been having a profound impact on our physical and ecological environment. However, these transformations are often not perceptible: they are literally too small or too big (like e.g. global warming), too slow or too fast (like e.g. the flow of big data), so that our senses, even our imagination, and despite the fact that we have adequate theoretical and technical instruments, cannot grasp them. We artists are currently facing these climatic regimes/intensities, whether biospheric or algorithmic, and feel disoriented with our incapacity to create times and spaces of experience to account for this ecological transition in a sensitive, reflective and critical way. We, performing artists, feel the need to renew our tools and registers of representation to redirect the theatrical attention towards the many non-human actors and factors that already entered the stage of our future, which is already our contemporaneity. This aesthetic revision calls for scenic responses that go beyond the conventional production and organization of a “stage” that has, according to me, become inoperative in its spatiotemporal conventional settings (the human-sized here and now) for addressing the scales of those hyperobjects (Morton, 2013).

赤潮 akashio / marée rouge / redtide is the 25thscène (stage and scene) of my ongoing research piece Reacclimating the Stage that ecodramaturgically speculates on the perceptive shift. What I call a “scene” is a temporary transactional zone that assembles different material and temporal elements in order to apprehend poetically, through an installative/scenographic setting, the hyper-real condition addressed above. Micro and macro scales (including the yellow scales of a sea monster) are intra-acting here, toxic deterioration of the seas and aggregates of data are confluencing, in glitching resonance with tragic leftovers of disillusioned humanist theatre.” (handout)